Orange County Buddhist Church
Orange County Buddhist Church
You will be reading this, if at all, a month and a half or more after the facts. Back in mid-August, we BCA ministers held our annual summer seminar (fuken), with the subject this year being “prayer.” Professors Akira Ohmine, of Osaka University, and Thomas Kasulis, of Ohio State University, were the guest lecturers. It was a very thought-provoking seminar for me, especially since I was of the school of thought that said there is no prayer in Jodo Shinshu. It was also a very humbling experience, because it brought home to me how little I knew, first of all, and, second, how far behind I was in terms of keeping up with Buddhist studies, which seems to have moved beyond me by leaps and bounds. Just to reassure you, though, those things do not necessarily mean one is without shinjin, or faith. However, they are necessities if one is supposed to be teaching the Buddha Dharma.
However that may be, the seminar was, as I said, very thought-provoking. Although we all have some idea as to what prayer is, it is probably the case that the first thing we think of is what is usually called petitionary prayer, by which we ask someone or something for something, e.g., a good grade, a good job (or nowadays, any job), to get over an illness, to stay alive, and so on.
However, one of the greatest (to my mind) Buddhists of the last century, D.T. Suzuki, translated Hongan, which we usually call Original Vow or Primal Vow, as Original Prayer. That always bothered me, primarily because I did not know the rationale behind it. Another great 20th Century Buddhist thinker, Soga Ryojin, put it this way, according to Prof. Ohmine: “The fundamental nature of prayer is most purely manifested in the Tathagata’s Primal Vow. In the words of Soga Ryojin, it is not the prayer that sentient beings [i.e., you and I] offer to the Buddha. Rather, it is a prayer that the Buddha offers for the sake of sentient beings. The Primal Vow is not something separate from prayer; it is none other than the completion and purification of prayer. Our encounter with the Tathagata’s Primal Vow transforms our perspective from being the ‘pray-er’ to being the ‘one that has been prayed for’ by the Tathagata since the very beginning.” In other words, when we say the Nembutsu, Namo Amida Butsu, we are not asking Amida to enable us to realize enlightenment through birth in the Pure Land; we are responding to Amida’s “prayer” that we realize enlightenment through birth in the Pure Land. That is why it is sometimes called “an utterance of gratitude” on our parts.
Prof. Kasulis went into more detail regarding the different kinds of prayer there were, as far as scholars were concerned, and how American Jodo Shinshu might use the word. He spoke of upaya, efficient or effective means, as coming from the desire to include all and not exclude anyone, that it is an act of compassion. Compassion, of course, is what gives us the Nembutsu. He called the Nembutsu the vocalization of the working of the Primal Vow, which is essentially what Soga called it. There were a number of other things he brought up in his talk, but they were somewhat technical, so I will not go into them here.
Perhaps Revs. Miyaji and Harada will expand on the subject. In any case, I shall try to utilize what I learned in whatever way I can.
Gassho,
Dull-Rooted Jaan,
Rev. John Doami
